Peppers? Pickles? Why are they there?

Who started accompanying pizza with peppers. I understand that it may be tasty to squirt some pepper juice on the pizza, but I've never seen anyone do that in my whole life. All people do with them is eat them plain. Every time someone opens a box of pizza and sees a pepper they say, "Okay, who wants the pepper?" Nobody ever eats them with the pizza. The peppers are just there. It seems you could replace the pepper with anything: chips, a tomato, a block of cheese. It especially gets me going when they have a pepper but they don't have garlic or marinara sauce. Those condiments actually enhance the taste of pizza. When they are replaced with a pepper that has no use at all but to be eaten individually, it doesn't make any sense.

It's kind of like the pickle that comes with sandwiches. It's most often a fourth of a pickle, but the cuts are made along the width, not the height. Thus, the pickle is too long to put onto the sandwich, and you must eat it alone (or as my dad was saying have one bite and then have a bite of the sandwich). Although eating those pickles is sometimes my favorite part of the meal (as I often break out into the song from The Little Rascals, "I gotta pickle, I gotta pickle, I gotta pickle hey hey hey hey!") I still don't understand how the pickle with the sandwich became a tradition, and moreso why it stayed a tradition. The same thing with the pepper- it's a waste a money for the pizza companies to include the pepper, because people are going to eat the pizza with or without the pepper. Also, I'm going to eat the sandwich with or without the side pickle. Those things really have no effect on if I'm going to eat the main part of the meal or not.

They're just too frivolous, unneeded. As much as they are tasty, their presence doesn't make sense.